Mathematician Accuses OpenAI of Pressuring Him to Hide Its Navier-Stokes Breakthrough
Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge claim to have achieved finite-time blowup for the incompressible Euler equations and related models, using LLMs to extend earlier work by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa. Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI, after learning of their progress, pressured him to co-author a paper on an internal model's forced Navier-Stokes blowup, excluding Alpöge due to his Anthropic affiliation. He declined, and now goes public with the details.
I am stating it because the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to be false.
- n2d4
Drama/accusation summary:
- Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler."
- they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there
- Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.
- Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify, without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.
- After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.
- Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.
- Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.
- OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he wor […]
- qnleigh
> It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers. I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
I'm not even sure what to say to this, but I think this should be widely known if it is indeed what happened.
- mayakacz
I'm not one to comment often but this really pisses me off.
OpenAI looked at user data, stole world class researchers' work, and then tried to threaten those researchers to do what would make their corporation profit (which they would anyways!).
Imagine you have been working on a terribly difficult math problem for a decade. This is a result you have spent years on, and what you will likely be remembered for. And to have some punk from OpenAI lie to you, threaten you, and tell you that they are willing to go on the record that you "deserved" it? What is this, the Godfather?
If OpenAI solved Navier-Stokes, that is an astounding result! - yet they'll still be remembered as those who thought credit was more important than results. That winning was more important than collaboration. If this is true, they're burning any trust left with academia.
- traes
The accused Sebastian Bubeck has denied the allegations on Twitter[0], and various other OpenAI employees[1,2] seem to be mocking another Anthropic employee voicing support for Levent[3]? Things are getting messy.
[0] https://xcancel.com/SebastienBubeck/status/20972141224714323...
[1] https://xcancel.com/polynoamial/status/2097215233119211902
[2] https://xcancel.com/danintheory/status/2097214838003138603
[3] https://xcancel.com/_sholtodouglas/status/209721833169057800...
- Semkas
So, leaving aside the idea that OA might've used data from the researchers Codex sessions: Do I understand correctly that the internal OpenAI work on the problems was probably started after they heard Alpoge and Buckmaster had made process by using their models? And they used the publicly available info about the researchers past work to prompt their models?
If compute is cheap, and the difficult thing with scientific discovery is now mostly in steering agents into promising areas, there's an obvious incentive for OA mathematicians to simply monitor closely which researchers are close to releasing exciting results, make some assumptions about their prompts based on their past work, and quickly prompt their own (stronger) model to look into the same areas.
- taylorfinley
Seems pretty likely OpenAI will soon disclose that their internal models have managed to compromise their internal controls in order to access users' private chat histories as a creative method of cheating to solve impossible problems.
"Oops! We really did mean it when we said we wouldn't train on your data. Our models are just so good they decided to anyway."
- Recursing
> This is a a Deep Blue-Kasparov moment.
I guess this is true in more ways than one. Kasparov famously accused IBM of cheating during the match, by spying on his preparation (edit: though the main cheating accusation was live human intervention during the games, on top of IBM downplaying the heavy human involvement behind the AI, which also mirrors this situation)
- tristanj
Full mastodon post: https://mathstodon.xyz/@[email protected]/11...
Mathematical explanation by Terrance Tao: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117233527638291447
It seems there is much background drama behind this, and this is what I've pieced together of what happened:
Over the past year, Buckmaster and Alpöge have been using AI to work on fluid dynamics maths problems. Alpöge works at Anthropic, which will cause future issues.
In mid-August, they found a counterexample for a simpler version of the Navier-Stokes problem. They spend the next few weeks preparing their paper.
In early September, rumors start spreading on X that Anthropic has solved a Millennium prize problem (and that it's Navier-Stokes). Buckmaster reaches out to OpenAI to explain this is their own personal research, not an Anthropic project.
A few days later, OpenAI gets back to him, and tells him an internal model found has a counterexample for Navier–Stokes, potentially worth the $1 million Millennium prize. The proof uses the same method that Buckmaster and Alpöge chose to work on. They don't show him the proof.
Buckmaster pressed them for more details. OpenAI reveals they had an entire team had been working on the problem, and that they started work in the past few days, after the rumors that Anthropic had solved a Millennium prize problem.
Buckmaster says OpenAI talked about a shared publication timeline. They want to Buckmaster to publish first, then give Buckmaster shared credit for the Mill […]